Is art epistemically valuable? Catherine Z. Elgin answers this question in the affirmative. She argues for the epistemic value of art on the basis of her innovative epistemological theory, in which the focus is shifted from knowledge and truth to a non-factive account of understanding. After an exposition and critique of her view, as she develops it in her most recent book “True Enough” (MIT-Press, 2017), I will build on some of her ideas in order to strengthen her account.

Kendall Walton’s account of make-believe takes the social dimension of imagination into account. In this paper I aim to extend this suggestion and argue that works of fiction allow for encounters with concrete (yet fictitious) persons with a distinct point of view and a discernible perspective. These encounters allow us to contrast the perspective(s) that emerge from the work with one’s own. I will then discuss two moments of the social dimension: imagining fictional scenarios is a social practice, a game (...) we play together and in which we encounter others. Both of these moments shed light on the central role of fiction for the social community in which it is embedded and show how engaging with works of fiction can contribute to the inner cohesion and to the persistence of the group. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that narrative representations can provide knowledge in virtue of their narrativity, regardless of their truth value. I set out the question in section 1, distinguishing narrative cognitivism from aesthetic cognitivism and narrative representations from non-narrative representations. Sections 2 and 3 argue that exemplary narratives can provide lucid phenomenological knowledge, which appears to meet both the epistemic and narrativity criteria for the narrative cognitivist thesis. In section 4, I turn to non-narrative representation, focusing (...) on lyric poetry as presenting a disjunctive objection: either lucid phenomenological knowledge can be reduced to identification and fails to meet the epistemic criterion, or lucid phenomenological knowledge is provided in virtue of aesthetic properties and fails to meet the narrativity criterion. I address both of these problems in sections 5 and 6, and I close with a tentative suggestion as to how my argument for narrative c.. (shrink)

This chapter provides the background to the American women philosophers’ works that are introduced and collected in Knowledge, Mind and Reality: An Introduction by Early Twentieth-Century American Women Philosophers. We describe the institutional context which made these works possible and their methodological and theoretical background. We also provide biographies for their authors.

Cognitivism in respect to the arts refers to a constellation of positions that share in common the idea that artworks often bear, in addition to aesthetic value, a significant kind of cognitive value. In this paper I concentrate on three things: (i) the challenge of understanding exactly what one must do if one wishes to defend a cognitivist view of the arts; (ii) common anti-cognitivist arguments; and (iii) promising recent attempts to defend cognitivism.

The aim of this article is to examine and defend videogame cognitivism (VC). According to VC, videogames can be a source of cognitive successes (such as true beliefs, knowledge or understanding) for their players. While the possibility of videogame-based learning has been an extensive topic of discussion in the last decades, the epistemological underpinnings of these debates often remain unclear. I propose that VC is a domain- specific brand of aesthetic cognitivism, which should be carefully distinguished from other views that (...) also insist on the cognitive or educational potential of videogames. After these clarifications, I discuss and assess different broad strategies to motivate VC: propositionalism, experientialism, and neocognitivism. These map the different ways in which videogames can prove epistemically valuable, showing them to be, respectively, sources of propositional knowledge, experiential knowledge, and understanding. I eventually argue that neocognitivism is a particularly promising and yet underexplored way to defend VC. (shrink)